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They Call Themselves ‘The Détente’: Inside the Intense Summer Weeks for SMU Football, and the Action Group It Awakened

There was a point this summer when SMU football reached a high water mark. It was an inflection point during a tumultuous time of reckoning.

Right to left: Kazadi and Westfall make their first drop of supplies on Jan. 29.

The PAC-12 and Big Ten conferences had just announced their intention to not play during the fall season, a choice that would later be reversed. And SMU football was in the midst of a series of Zoom meetings, some lasting hours into the night and others stretching on into multiple days.

The topic at hand, in player only meetings and program-wide conversations, was how SMU would go about tackling the 2020 season as the nation erupted into protest.